A History of Ancient Britain (3 page)

CHAPTER ONE

ICE

Until the arrival of human beings, people more or less like us, there was no meaningful time in the universe. Astronomers and physicists say different and measure the age of
the cosmos by the billions of years (around 13.7 billion, in fact). But before there was intelligent life the mindless comings and goings of galaxies, stars and planets had no witness. Nothing
existed even to notice, far less reckon the passing of all those moments. There
was no awareness of the past and certainly no sense of a future – just a meaningless,
disembodied
now
.

Time is beyond even the comprehension of the cosmologists who make it their preoccupation. They have called the firing of the universal starting pistol the Big Bang – but it seems it was
neither big, nor a bang. Time, space and everything else in the universe were contained within a ‘singularity’ – something infinitesimal, immeasurably tiny – that appeared
for reasons unknown and in a place unknown.

Seemingly driven by the inevitability of physical laws, it began spontaneously to expand, like a balloon inflating, and it continues to do so. There is apparently no sense in asking what
happened before the singularity appeared and began to grow because until it did, there
was . . . no . . . time
. At the very moment the singularity began to expand, it made room inside for
time along with everything else. As if all of that were not baffling enough, the universe is not expanding into space because all the space there will ever be is not outside the universe –
somehow surrounding it – but
inside
it.

During those first moments there was unimaginable heat – billions of degrees centigrade of heat that cooked the available particles into simple elements like hydrogen and helium, the two
elements that, by themselves, account for 99 per cent of all visible matter in the universe. (The Russian cosmologist George Gamow, towering champion of the Big Bang theory, suggested all this
happened fast – very fast – so that the first course of our universe was served in minutes: ‘in less time than it takes to cook a dish of duck and roast potatoes’.)

It is the heat inside stars that has cooked the gold, carbon, iron, uranium and the rest of the 118 other known elements which in time conspired to make planets and spiders, flowers and us. Only
in their death throes do stars release the stuff of worlds and so, depending on your point of view, we are made either of stardust or nuclear waste. Along with everything else in the universe we
are still inside that expanding dot: a place at once incomprehensibly huge and yet – since it is expanding into and inside nothing at all – immeasurably small.

Who on earth can deliver all of this with a straight face, far less claim to understand it?

After eight billion or so uncounted, unlamented years came planet Earth and, three and a half billion more years after that, a soup of life began to simmer in her oceans. A slow procession
followed: plants grew, fish swam
and lizards crawled. Tectonic plates – the great rafts of rock that encrust the planet – drifted upon the currents of its molten
core, the continents we know today trapped shapeless and as yet unsculpted within. The rocky components of Britain, at first scattered far and wide, were clumsily crushed together during the course
of a trans-global odyssey that began several billion years ago, not far from the South Pole. They reached their present location, in roughly recognisable form, around 60 million years ago.

While Britain’s component parts travelled north, dinosaurs ruled the earth, before a collision with a meteor all but wiped the planet clean of life once more. Birds and mammals emerged
stunned and blinking from the chaos, not quite the creatures we know today but reasonable likenesses, and yet still none of it mattered because not one of those beasts had the wit to notice each
had had a beginning and that all of them would come to an end.

Not until the advent of creatures with a sense of their own mortality, of infinity and their place within it, did the aeons weigh at all. Before the coming of human consciousness, all the years
from the Big Bang passed in an instant; unmarked and forgotten as though they had never been. Like the tree that falls in an empty wood, making no noise, so the billions of years were accounted for
in less than no time.

As far as we know, we human beings of planet Earth are the first and only animals to have felt the unbearable weight of infinity, the first to remember and to mourn. At the moment of our
awakening as a species Earth – even the universe itself – awoke too. The clock started ticking and someone, somewhere, counted one day more . . . one day less.

Time, therefore, starts with us. It starts with us and holds us in servitude to it. This is our blessing and our curse. And so history starts with us as well. Only we have bothered to wonder
what came before – and to keep a record of events as they unfold. This urge to keep track is part service to the future and part vanity. In addition to informing our descendants of the
back-story that will give a context to their present, we hope to be remembered there – to have been noticed and to have mattered.

Memory . . . remembering . . . history . . . these are uniquely human. We are Earth’s youngest apes – feeble, without claws or fangs, with neither speed nor strength, naked of
feather or fur – and yet beneath thin caps of bone we are possessed of minds that reach backwards and forwards in time. It is a predicament. In all the universe we alone are troubled by
when
?

But in the end it is our awareness that our time is short that drives us to
find out who we are and where we came from, while we have the chance. It is this pursuit of
knowledge of the past, our desire for
history
to fill the void of all the time that came before that makes us human, and that will enable us to cope with whatever is coming.

Fittingly for a history of ancient Britain, it was a
Briton
– in fact a Scot – who was first to feel the weight of time, to sense just how old the planet might be. Born in
Edinburgh on 3 June 1726, James Hutton eventually shone among the brightest stars of the Scottish Enlightenment. He was part of that gilded age when Scotland was Europe’s philosophical and
scientific leader. He walked the same streets as the economist Adam Smith, author of
The Wealth of Nations
; the same as the chemist Joseph Black and the engineer James Watt, whose combined
efforts developed the universal steam engine; the same as the philosopher David Hume and the poet Robert Burns, among scores of others.

Hutton was variously a student of agriculture, chemistry, medicine, meteorology and philosophy but it is for his contribution to the science of geology that he is best remembered. Though
educated in a world still in thrall to the belief that God had created everything in six days (completing the job, according to the seventeenth-century Irish Archbishop James Ussher, on 23 October
in the year 4004
BC
), he was a born observer who took, as his principal teacher, the landscape around him.

It is worth noting that Hutton’s hometown is shaped more than any other in Britain by its geology. Born in the shadow of Edinburgh’s Salisbury Crags, he seemingly absorbed their
significance into his DNA – read for the first time the truth they had been broadcasting to the world for millions of years in letters made of basalt and standing 150 feet high.

The Crags loom over the lower part of the city’s Old Town like a fossilised wave, and that is what they are. Hundreds of millions of years ago molten basalt surged upwards from deep within
the planet’s core but failed to burst out onto the surface. Trapped underground, it cooled between two older layers of soft, sedimentary rock. Many more millions of years later an Ice Age
glacier scoured the land – easily stripping away the softer rock and leaving the hard black Crags exposed to the light for the first time.

All of this is accepted truth today, but it took a son of the Scottish Enlightenment to see those towering cliffs for what they were – evidence of geological time as we understand it. As
well as the landforms around his hometown Hutton travelled throughout the rest of Scotland and into England as well, in pursuit of understanding. In 1788 he published his
Theory of the Earth
– a work that was to travel across the world with an elemental force equal to that of any glacier. A full 70 years before Charles Darwin rewrote the
history of life on Earth in
The Origin of Species
Hutton’s logic bulldozed away centuries of religious dogma to reveal the natural truth of Earth’s great age lying unbreakable
and immovable beneath.

Rather than a creation of six divine days, when Hutton considered the making of the Earth he saw ‘no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end’. Though he did not use the term
himself Hutton had laid the foundations for ‘Uniformitarianism’ – a philosophy which assumes that the natural processes shaping the world and the wider universe today are exactly
the same as those that held sway in the past. Hutton’s way of looking at the world in the eighteenth century is the way we see it now. He is remembered as the father of geology but he was
also part of the greater revolution that first invited humankind to gaze into the bottomless abyss of ‘deep time’.

For all his glacial powers of reasoning, the realisation that ice had sculpted Britain’s landscape was not Hutton’s. It was another Edinburgh Scot who was first to bring this next
revolutionary theory into the public domain. Charles Maclaren was editor of
The Scotsman
newspaper in 1840 when he received a letter from Professor Robert Jameson, a geologist and
mineralogist working at Edinburgh University. It was a young Swiss naturalist turned geologist named Louis Agassiz who had actually written the letter, in the hope that Jameson would publish it in
his
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal
, but the letter arrived just as the journal was going to press. Jameson was so impressed by its contents, however, that he immediately passed it on to
Maclaren – so that it might quickly reach public attention via the city’s newspaper.

The resultant scoop was nothing less than earth-shattering. Published on 7 October 1840, the letter expressed Agassiz’s conviction that Scotland had, in ancient times, been completely
submerged beneath an enormous glacier of ice. It was the culmination of years of observations by the scientist, of glaciated valleys in his homeland. There it was common knowledge that the existing
glaciers had once extended further towards the lowlands. Though the ice was gone from the lower reaches, the evidence of its passing was plain to see in the deep gouging and polishing of the
visible rock surfaces, along with great heaps and scatterings of rocks and boulders – erratics – carried and deposited far from home. When Agassiz subsequently
learned about similar evidence on mountains in Scotland – where no glaciers either existed or were ever known to have existed in the past – the truth of it all was instantly
obvious to him: Scotland’s landscape had been sculpted by ice.

In 1840 he travelled to Scotland and there, in the company of friends, toured the Highlands to see for himself the evidence of ancient glaciation. Following the publication of his letter in
The Scotsman
, on 7 October, Agassiz travelled to Edinburgh later that month where he joined Maclaren for a tour of the geological features surrounding the city. Some impressed him more than
others but when he was taken to Blackford Hill, on the southern outskirts, he immediately spotted telltale horizontal striations etched into the surface of a distinctive wall of andesite lava on
the lower slopes. The wall is popular today with climbers keen to hone their skills and it is known as ‘Agassiz Rock’, for it was there that the Swiss geologist excitedly declared:
‘That is the work of ice!’

Agassiz did not stop there either, with the suggestion of an Ice Age only in Scotland’s past. Rather he saw in his mind’s eye a glacier covering all of Europe, if not the rest of the
planet, at some time. Today it is hard for us to appreciate how revolutionary this breakthrough was. Despite its publication in Scotland in 1840, it would be another 20 years before the wider
scientific community, let alone the God-fearing public, accepted Agassiz’s theory. Until then geologists, mineralogists and antiquarians alike had been trying faithfully to reconcile what
they saw in the world around them with the Biblical tale of creation most of them still carried in their fearful hearts. In the middle years of the eighteenth century, scientists struggled to
comprehend natural phenomena in the context of the six-day Creation and The Flood – the apocalyptic deluge with which God had punished all but Noah and his family.